Some insight from the Autodesk CEO, Carl Bass, and CTO, Jeff Kowalski, from an interview by ENR.

Bass: I play tennis with Chris Anderson from 3D Robotics. I would take a similar approach to drones as I do with 3D printing. I think most of the important applications with drones will come from industrial uses. Skycatch is on the Apple campus, and morning meetings are an aerial survey of the day before. That’s what the project managers look at, the aerial survey. With lots of people building large things like rails and roads, it’s really inefficient to send people there so it’s a good place for drones. I think it’s an incredibly valuable thing. I’m 98% in the enthusiastic category with drones, and 2% creeps me out. But it’s like that with any technology. I generally don’t think that banning and overregulating the technology is the answer. Bad people are going to do bad things. Our friend, who is a futurist for the FBI, so whenever we see something and say, isn’t this cool? And he screams.

Kowalski: We brought a 3d printed gun to the UK and waved it around to Tech Global. We were trying to say that technology can be harnessed for good or it can be used and abused at the same time.

Bass: There’s the FAA concern…I don’t know why people are flying them into planes. But I also don’t know why people are shining lasers into pilots’ eyes from the ground. But I think we’ll see more industrial uses than consumer.

Carl’s right, there will always be some asshat’s out there doing stupid stuff that the normal folks wouldn’t. And they are the ones that end up causing the issues for the rest of us. Idiots, can’t we just put them on an island somewhere?